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The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left

Abstract

The conflict between America and "old" Europe over the war in Iraq has revealed
an enormous gap in perception between these erstwhile allies and has led to a
furious debate over the implications of this gap in the Post-9/11 world.
Speculation abounds regarding the "hidden" motives of the leaders of each of
the countries involved in this conflict as people seek to make sense of the
depth and vitriol of the conflict. Indeed, in the run-up to war, it was
clear that George Bush and Tony Blair could barely comprehend France's resolute
opposition to implementing Resolution 1441. Similarly, the depth and size
of the anti-American outpouring in Europe seemed to defy all previous
conceptions of the relationship between the U.S., Germany and France.

In this article, I argue that George Bush and Tony Blair's appeal to common
ideals in their attempt to recruit Europe to the task of reshaping the Middle
East is fundamentally mistaken: such common ideals do not exist. Indeed,
I will argue that the Cold War is not over, that the U.S. has not won the "war"
and that the battles that lie ahead will be far more difficult to pin down than
even the asymmetric warfare of the Islamic terrorists. These battles will not
be fought with guns and missiles but will take place in the sphere of
ideology. The core issue around which these battles will be joined is the
very definition of what it means to be a free society. Among the European
masses and across the spectrum of academic intellectuals on both sides of the
Atlantic, the position of classical liberalism - the founding ideology of the
United States - has already lost. Thus, while the U.S. has won a
protracted battle against one manifestation of a larger philosophical challenge
to American political ideals (the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union), it is
losing the broader battle taking place in the hearts and minds of people the
world over.

A Framework for Anti-Americanism

The Fall of the Soviet Union

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989, America and the West
appropriately rejoiced over the fall of one of the most repressive regimes in
modern history. The Soviet Union had been born in blood, come of age in terror
and repression and reached maturity as an expansionist nuclear power.
Considered from a historical perspective, the fall of the Soviet Union from
this pinnacle occurred at breathtaking speed. The world's political and
intellectual elite were forced to retreat from a refusal to believe it
possible, to a refusal to believe it probable, to a shocked recognition that it
had already occurred in less than a decade.

Given the sheer size, scope and power of the Soviet Union, its shattering would
surely not have occurred if not for an even more materially powerful rival in
the West whose very existence laid lie to the promises of Communist
utopia. After the fall, many in the West celebrated not just because an
opposing military power had been eliminated but also because the fall
represented the defeat of a powerful but deadly philosophical ideal:
Communism. In the years that have passed since then, it has become a
comfortable belief in America that the remaining holdouts of Communism; China,
Cuba, and North Korea, remain in power by simply ignoring the philosophical
contradictions in Communism and corruptly enforcing their will at the point of
a gun. The remaining Communist Political Parties in Europe, it is
claimed, are manned by those too senseless to realize they are dead and too
stubborn to fall over. More to the present point, it is a popular belief
in Western Conservative circles - the philosophical inheritors of Locke's ideal
of a Liberal Democratic state - that the fall of the Soviets discredited the
entire enterprise of Marxist leftism. If the extreme manifestation of
Marxism failed, they reason, then "Marxism Lite" is bound to fail as well -
albeit more slowly since they both suffer from the same inherent
contradictions.

In this view, the Conservatives woefully underestimated the justification for
and power of the philosophical challenge that remains. In particular,
Marxists in academia, in European political parties and in power are not
isolated, rootless entities. In contrast, they swim in a sea of support as
broad and as deep as that enjoyed by Democratic Capitalists. Indeed, the
assumptions they share with the broader political left are more important than
the distinctions between them.

More to the present point, the fall of the Soviet Union freed the various
Socialist and Green movements in Europe to oppose America directly without the
fear of appearing to side with the Soviets. That is, the fall of the wall
did not cause the Left to revise their theories of the good society, it
ironically emboldened them to attack America’s implicit theory of society more
directly.

America and Europe After 9/11

In the days immediately following 9/11, America and much of the world found a
common bond in their horror at what had happened in New York, Pennsylvania, and
Washington, DC. The outpouring of support convinced nearly all Americans
that the world would stand by its side as it sought to eliminate the scourge of
extremist terrorism. In the abstract, this was absolutely true.
From a practical perspective, however, this missed an important point: in order
to stand together to eliminate terrorism, the world must share a
common view of a "good" society or else the very definition of terrorism itself
will remain in play. A suicide mission to strike down a
ruthless, subhuman oppressor will strike supporters as an almost Gandhian
sacrifice. A mass murderer sacrificing himself in support of a medieval
theocratic alternative to liberal modernity will obviously not. The
question is: is liberal capitalism a subhuman oppressor or the essence of
modernity? Is the Western way of life good?

I hope to show that the American brand of liberal capitalism stands discredited
in the eyes of the dominant philosophical tradition of Europe and much of
American academia. This tradition, called the Post-Modern Left for
lack of a better term, offers an alternative, conflicting view of the
social good. In this tradition, there is little moral difference
between the failed, "victim" states in the Middle East and the failed,
"aggressor" state of America and thus little reason to favor one over the
other. Indeed, the sheer strength of the American beast makes it clear to
the Post-Modern Left that America is the greater long-term
threat. It is thus not surprising that when George Bush escalated
the war beyond the punishment of al Queda and their Taliban sympathizers and
into an attempt to remake the political culture of the entire Middle East,
opposition rose dramatically. In a very real sense, Bush did "squander
the good will" of the world community because he was clearly bent on imposing a
political vision on the region that would be acceptable to Washington.
This was not a failure of diplomacy so much as the inevitable outcome of any
attempt by America to widen its sphere of influence - and by proxy the
influence of liberal capitalism - at the expense of rival forms of political
organization such as those offered by the Post-Modern Left.

As important as this rivalry is, however, the most corrosive and
inflammatory criticisms have been reserved for George Bush the
person. To understand why Bush's moral certainty and his unyielding
commitment earn him a special place in the inner circle of
post-modern hell, we must delve into the foundations of this school of thought
and how they are manifested in the real world. As I will argue, when
protestors carry signs to the effect that "America is the terrorist" or "Bush =
Hitler", they are not simply being stupid. They are reflecting - in a
crass and foggy way - a fundamental conclusion of the Post-Modern philosophical
tradition.

In the final analysis, the root cause of this clash of ideals, and the
reason that Europeans find a choice between America and Islamofascism a bit of
a toss-up, is that America and France (and Germany) are not philosophical
allies. Indeed, the French are defending a specific
European ideal from American depredation. They are shuttling this ideal
through the dark night of Islamic terrorism in much the same way that they did
during the Soviet phase of the Cold War. In that phase, they sensed that
the Soviets, for all of their crude, blustering stupidities, were still the
best counter-weight to American ideals. Thus, they cooperated fitfully in
denying the Soviets military hegemony over Western Europe but at no point did
they defend American ideals as more broadly stated. Similarly, they may
fear the Islamic Fascists and Baathists in the abstract but they have a greater
fear of Anglo-American ideals in their concrete, McWorld reality. America
is the bigger threat.

America's View of Anti-Americanism

Before discussing foundations, it is useful to examine how America has explained
virulent anti-Americanism to itself. The most popular explanation has
been that the opposition to America is rooted in France's desire to reclaim its
position of
political preeminence. In this view, Germany, led by
the weak and ineffective Schroder, has tagged along to bask in pan-Europeanism
and Chirac's popularity. It is argued that, by building a European
superstate with France in the lead, Chirac hopes to roll back American hegemony
and reestablish French prestige and power. Such a renascent France would
create the international political structures necessary to lead the world as a diplomatic
superpower and thus render impotent America's advantage in military
power.

The problems with this explanation are manifold: it does not explain the mass
expression of political opposition to American policies in the "European
street", it does not account for similar behavior within the intellectual and
cultural "elite" in America, and it assumes that Chirac is too shortsighted to
see that America will surely shrug off such international constraints in time.

In a similar vein, political writer Steven
Den Beste has suggested that France has opposed an
invasion of Iraq because it fears embarrassing revelations about French
complicity in arming and supporting Iraq in the face of UN mandates to the
contrary. While Den Beste and others making this point may be correct in
the details, they miss the larger point: why would the French have
thought it in their interest to betray its supposed American allies?
While simple realpolitik is a reasonable answer, this still doesn't account for
the intensity of the opposition and its breadth within the European masses.
To put forth this explanation, one has to assume that the French and German
electorate that fill the streets baying for American withdrawal are merely
sheep, willing to take to the streets to help their leaders avoid
"embarrassment." Thus, this argument as well fails to acknowledge or
account for the underlying root of anti-Americanism.

In contrast to the popular explanations, I argue that Chirac has not led
the charge for French renascence of late but that he has merely ridden popular
opinion. In less than a year, Chirac has risen from his ignominious
reputation as the "supermenteur" (super liar) of France to be one of the most
popular politicians in all of Europe largely on the strength of his
anti-American stance. That is, while the popular American press searches
for clues to Chirac's hidden motivations, they miss the simple fact that he has
enjoyed an unprecedented political gains at home by acting in this
fashion.

The Western Tradition, Rousseau, and Post-Modernism

The Western Tradition and Democratic Capitalism

"Two centuries ago, when liberal republicanism was
overthrowing the "Old Regime" in Europe and America, these questions concerning
moral and civic foundations received a rich response. The response was
elaborated in grounding treatises of poetical philosophy written by thinkers
who characterized themselves as the bringers of the Enlightenment or the Age of
Reason. These philosophers of modernity, from Spinoza and Locke to Kant
and even Hegel, spoke not simply of human rights but emphatically of "natural
rights," issuing in moral "laws of nature and of nature's God," and accompanied
by such foundational concepts as the "state of nature," the "social compact,"
and the "categorical imperative." (Pangle, 1992).

I will assume that the reader is familiar with at least the outlines of the
Anglo-American political tradition. There are two observations to make
that are germane to the present case: the Enlightenment thinkers assumed the
existence of "laws of nature and of nature's God" and they operated very
consciously within the bounds of a sober and realistic appraisal of human
nature. That is, these men saw themselves as discoverers, not prophets.
As Isaiah Berlin said of Montesquieu:

"Montesquieu advocated constitutionalism, the preservation
of civil liberties, the abolition of slavery, gradualism, moderation, peace,
internationalism, social and economic justice with due respect to national and
local tradition. He believed in justice and the rule of law; detested all forms
of extremism and fanaticism; put his faith in the balance of power and the
division of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or
groups or majorities; and approved of social equality, but not the point which
it threatened individual liberty; and out of liberty, but not to the point
where it threatened to disrupt orderly government." (Berlin,
Against the Current, 2001).

Implicit in the early formulations of liberal democracy was a model of man that
Rousseau would come to call the bourgeois: the rational and
industrious man (as Locke described him). Bourgeois freedom is simply the
state in which men, released from the chains of servitude, could pursue their
own commercial and personal interests. During the Scottish Enlightenment,
this perspective came into its full flowering with Adam Smith's publication of
the "Wealth of Nations." For Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment,
liberal democracy is built on an unconditional model of man
as rational, universalist, and commercial. Such an individual not only
recognizes his own interests but, in his interactions with fellow citizens,
recognizes their rational, universal rights as well.

Democratic Capitalism and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

The bourgeois model of economic, rational man is surely incomplete because, as
Rousseau points out in works described below, it ignores or downplays the
passions and even the irrationalities that lie at the core of our
humanity. More to Rousseau's point, society hardly needs to feed man's
love for himself and his desire to be first among men. A good and
just society is one in which man's natural selfishness will either be
redirected towards more noble ends by some implicit or explicit power.

However, the actual model of social man developed by Locke and the writers of
the Scottish enlightenment was broader than Rousseau acknowledged. In
particular, Christianity - and especially Calvinism - was inextricably linked
to the rise of commercial culture in Northern Europe. For Scottish
thinkers such as Hutcheson and Lord Kames, faith provided the fundamental
framework of trust necessary for the success of the Democratic Capitalist
venture:

"All of them [the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers] embraced
Hutcheson's main point, that the message of Christianity was above all a moral
message....Unlike their French counterparts, the great minds of the Scottish
Enlightenment never saw Christianity as their mortal enemy - not even Hume, the
self-proclaimed skeptic. For the clerical disciples of Hutcheson, Church
and Enlightenment were natural allies, in much the same way as science and the
humanities were not pitted against each other, but were two halves of the same
intellectual enterprise." [Herman, How the Scots
Invented the Modern World, 69]

This being the case, the first chink in the armor of the liberal democratic
tradition is the observation that any model that depends on the willingly
assumed burden of faith is not unconditional. That is, not all people
will willingly take on this burden and so the model of man-in-society is not unconditional
but rather depends on this assumption. Of course, as experience has
shown, there are practical reasons for pressing ahead with the Liberal
Democratic tradition anyway since there are a variety of other mechanisms
available in the modern state to ensure the integrity of the society.

Rousseau: Cleaving the Western Tradition

Rousseau stands astride all of our philosophical traditions because it is he
alone that cleaved the Western tradition into Anglo-American and Continental
(European) lines of thought. Rousseau was, to the core, an Enlightenment
thinker himself. But while his work reflected modern Enlightenment
sensibilities and methods, it was essentially anti-modern in its
primary line of inquiry:

"Rousseau's earliest formulations of this critique of
modernity was in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, which exploded on the
European scene with a force hardly credible to us today. In it he made
the first attack on the Enlightenment based on the very principles that
motivation Enlightenment. Simply put, he argued that the progress and
dissemination of the sciences and arts, their emancipation from political and
religious control, are noxious to decent community and its foundation, virtue"
(from Bloom, 1990).

Rousseau was a complex philosopher and one cannot do him justice by distilling
his thought into a single line of explanation. He is variously the
founder of Romanticism, of redistributionist Socialism, of philosophical
Agrarianism, and of conservative Communitarianism. No "ism" can do his
thought justice despite his talent for spawning all of them. It is
possible to trace the roots of post-modernism, Communism, Socialism, Nazism,
Transcendentalism and both Thoreau and avant-garde art to Rousseau. And
it is possible to do all of things because it was Rousseau who cleaved man's
nature from the greatest engine of human material advancement in the history of
mankind: science and the technology that it spawned. The
philosophers that followed Rousseau picked and chose among his arguments and,
to a greater or lesser degree, from among the fruits of Enlightenment
thought. Marx, for example, accepted Rousseau's critique of Locke's
economic man while remaining solidly Enlightenment in his appreciation for the
role of science and technology. Indeed, modern Radical Marxists - with
their race and gender class theories and their rejection of "white male
rationalism" - are closer in spirit to Rousseau than Marx himself.

At the core, Rousseau's critique involved the prediction that a "rational and
industrious man" would inevitably descend into a self-absorbed brute willing to
place his material condition and interests above those of his community in the
struggle for power. In this atomization and alienation from community and
kin, Rousseau saw the dark seeds of a rejuvenated, mechanized and dehumanizing
return to slavery for the great mass of men. This time, rather than
subjugation to royalty, the common man would be outstripped in time by those
who were better or more ruthless in the aggregation of material goods.
With no constraints of patriotism, no ties to community and no incentive to
participate in a whole greater than oneself, society would simply descend into
the ruthless "struggle for primacy among individuals or groups who unite to
manipulate the whole." [Bloom, 1990]. When you hear "the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer," it is Rousseau speaking to you through the
ages. In particular, Rousseau believed that if men under the influence of
Enlightenment ideals succeed in seizing the reins of power, the ideals of
freedom and self-determination would soon be crushed by crass materials
interests. Thus was born the ideals of radical egalitarianism.

In contrast to the Enlightenment view of a peaceful, commercial society where
men cooperate in order to advance their common interests, Rousseau proposed a
civil society built around the concept of a common will. That
is, in moments of sober self-assessment people can recognize which of their
desires, appetites and behaviors are in the common good. To create a
society of common will - of freedom for all people - the people need only
recognize and hew to the dictates of the general will rather than descending
into the selfishness of their individual wills. The struggle would then
rise above a crass battle of all against all or rich against poor and would
instead be elevated into a personal, moral experience of
"self-overcoming." With struggle taken out of the public sphere, people
would be freed from the base "animal" desires and released into true human
freedom. This, wrote Rousseau, is the essence of "civilization."

As later elaborated by Marx, this reformed concept of freedom was to
become a central point of dispute between Classical Liberal ("modern") and
"Post Modern" philosophies:

"This kind of [capitalist] individual liberty is...at the
same time the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total
subjugation of individuality to social conditions which take the form of
material forces - and even of all-powerful objects that are independent of the
individuals creating them." [Marx, Grundrisse,
pp. 131]

and

"Freedom... can only consist in socialized man, the
associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature,
bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the
blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy
and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature."
[Marx, Selected Writings, pp
496 - both quotes take from Machan, Capitalism and
Individualism].

Like Rousseau, Marx and his later adherents believed that Capitalism would
inevitably result in slavery for most and freedom only for the
propertied. To counteract this tendency, all philosophers traceable to
Rousseau seek some degree of formal control over individual freedom in order to
ensure that all people enjoy the material conditions necessary for "true"
freedom.

Despite Rousseau's critique, America in the 18th century chose an almost pure
Constitutional Republican form of government and guaranteed the sanctity of
property rights. In this, they mostly ignored Rousseau and placed their
faith in Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith. Ironically, Thomas
Jefferson was the most prominent supporter of the French Revolution in America
and Rousseau's influence on Jefferson was reflected in his choice of language
for the American Declaration of Independence.

Rousseau's influence in Europe, as it emerged from Monarchy, was far greater. We
have been living with the consequences ever since.

Rousseau and Christianity

By and large, Rousseau dismissed the role of Christianity as a moderating force
in a commercial society despite its importance in forming the very foundations
of Northern European commercial culture. In reading Rousseau, this is not
surprising as it is clear that he had only a passing acquaintance with the
Christian political tradition in general and Calvinism in particular:

"Christianity as a religion is entirely spiritual, occupied
solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christian is not of this world.
He does his duty, indeed, but does it with profound indifference to the good or
ill success of his cares. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it
matters little to him whether things go well or ill here on earth. If the state
is prosperous, he hardly dares to share in the public happiness, for fear he
may grow proud of his country's glory; if the state is languishing, he blesses
the hand of God that is hard upon His people." [Rousseau, The Social Contract,
437]

As noted above, Rousseau's opponents, such as Locke and, especially, the
Scottish philosophers did not make this mistake. In Rousseau's defense,
at the time of his major works all of Europe lay exhausted by centuries of
genocidal religious warfare. Seen from this perspective, his rejection of
Christianity as a moderating force is not unreasonable. Nevertheless, his
call for transcendent values to harness the energies of men toward the "common
will" - coupled with his rejection of Christianity as the engine of these
values - became a central tenet of all of the ideologies descending from
Rousseau. More to the present point, this philosophical stance of Rousseau's is
perfectly reflected in the political sensibilities of the “post-Christian”
European electorate.

In reflection, Rousseau's rejection of Christianity was of enormous consequence
for the Enlightenment project. While it was reasonable for an 18th
century philosopher to doubt that Christianity would be a moderating influence,
it has, in retrospect, proven to be far more moderate in the years since
Rousseau published his critique of Democratic Capitalism than it was in the
centuries preceding his work. In essence, Christianity looked upon the
enormous bloodshed it had caused and, in exhaustion, was reformed so that it
would submit itself to the control of a secular state. The same cannot be
said for the "common will" that Rousseau developed. Far from being a
moderating influence and a force for preventing the excesses of Capitalism, it
became the most savage, bloody instrument of oppression in the history of
mankind.

Rousseau's Hydra

In what may fairly be called the first "ideological" military conflict of
history - the first based not in religious ideals but on philosophical ones -
the French "citizen army" faced the professional Prussian forces at Valmy in
1792. In a victory more psychological than military, the French army,
roaring "Vive la nation! Vive la France" prevented an arguably superior
Prussian force from marching on Paris to restore the monarchy. As the
Prussian army had marched into France, a mob in Paris had stormed the palace of
the Tuileries and had taken prisoner the royal family and a large host of
political prisoners. While fearing the Prussians, the French were also
intoxicated by the sense that they were to realize a new, radically egalitarian
state. This toxic brew erupted in the September Massacres in which over
1,000 prisoners were brutally hacked to death. As Fabre d'Eglantine declared:

"In the towns, let the blood of traitors be the first
holocaust to Liberty, so that in advancing to meet the
common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us."

As we'll see, only a true disciple of Rousseau could exult in a "holocaust to
Liberty." After the battle at Valmy was won, the French royal family
itself was slain and, in time, The Terror was visited upon all of
France. One irony of the French Revolution is that the French state,
which had become steadily more centralized in Paris in the century before the
revolution became even more so in the years afterward. In contrast to
Rousseau's philosophical ideal of small, intimate villages and a peaceful
society built on the consent to a common will, France became centralized,
militaristic and expansionistic. The contrast with America could not have
been greater. America, living the very ideals that Rousseau had attacked,
became a largely peaceful, agrarian society after its revolution albeit one
with a strong focus on science and technology.

As indicated above, Rousseau's thought was complex and multi-faceted.
Wherever his ideals have taken root, the adopting culture found in them a
mirror of some aspect of its own cultural identity. Pursuing this
idealization of their identity and emboldened by the logic of the Common Will,
many have descended into oppression and genocide. In France, Rousseau's
radical egalitarianism led to the bloodbath of "The Terror". In Germany,
via Nietzsche and later defended by Heidegger, Nazism rose on the foundation of
romanticism and the will to power. In Russia, via Marx and Lenin,
Communism was born in egalitarianism and collectivism and rapidly descended
into starvation and repression of a mammoth scale. In China and Cambodia,
again via Marx, agrarianism created the conditions for what was arguably the
greatest mass murder in human history in the Great Leap forward in China and
the Khmer Rouge's extermination of over 20% of Cambodia's population. The
conclusion is inescapable that Rousseau's multi-headed hydra is genocidal in
its practice regardless of its justification in philosophy. Nonetheless,
Rousseau's philosophical descendents enjoy considerable support in both
American and European academia and among the European media and political
elite. Genocide is no deterrent to this support: proponents such as Noam
Chomsky continued to defend the Khmer Rouge despite unmistakable evidence that
they had plunged Cambodia into mass murder.

The Current State of Post-Modernism

We can trace Rousseau's impact on prominent philosophers and economists to at
least four modern bodies of inquiry. In order to understand the
Post-Modern Left as it exists today in both its strengths and its weaknesses,
we will need to understand each of these areas of inquiry in some detail.
If you are primarily interested in conclusions, it would be quite reasonable to
skip forward to the summary at the end of this section.

Political Philosophy: Among its foremost philosophical proponents - those
who elaborate the details of the theory rather than march in the street -
Post-Modernism has become almost a caricature of itself. There remains no
thread of moral force behind the Post-Modernist argument as proponents such as
Lyotard, Vattimo and Rorty descend into barely lucid hedges about the
importance of "weak thinking" and the morality of making no commitments:

"from the fact that there is no promise of 'outcome,' nor
promise of decision, beyond the attempt to take to its extreme..the
possibilities implied in the weakness, the tragic aspect of weak thinking can
be attenuated. The tragic, for one who is habituated to it, can thus lose
its lacerating qualities." [Dal Lago, Thought as
Oscillation, Critique, 1985, pp 89]

The irony here is staggering. Rousseau criticized Democratic
Capitalism for its lack of passion in the defense of the common good and its
inability to reflect the greater aspirations of the soul. His descendants
now argue that the only moral stance is one of "weak thinking" and vacillation
in the face of the complexities of life. These descendents are at least honest:
they have been forced into this "weak-thinking" position because they have
recognized and grappled with the atrocities spawned by their
anti-democratic ideals.

Despite this descent into the defense of essentially nothing, the Post-Modernist
objection to the rationalist roots of Democratic Capitalism remains at the core
of their ideology. As Pangle observes:

"...one may seriously ask whether the warnings of the "weak
thinkers" are not more properly directed against modern anti-rationalism than
against the older forms of rationalism. Was it traditional rationalism
and traditional metaphysics (I include everything from Plato to natural law, to
Montesquieuian constitutionalism) that lent the crucial veneer of "depth" and
respectability to the Nazis? Was it not precisely the leaders of the
attack on Plato, natural law, and traditional metaphysics...who inspired and
enflamed the student youth and the academic establishment in their devilishness
[in Germany]?" [Pangle, The Ennobling of
Democracy, pp 54]

That is, despite nearly two and a half centuries of bloodshed in the pursuit of
Rousseauean ideals, the Post-Modernist descendants of Rousseau remain committed
to undermining Democratic Capitalism and casting misty eyes upon atrocities
committed in their name. Even Nazism was not vile enough for rejection by
the modern father of Post-Modernism, Heidegger:

"I see the position of humanity in the world of global
technology not as an inextricable and inescapable fate; rather I see the task
of thinking precisely...helps humanity in general finally to achieve an
adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism
(Nazism) certainly moved in that direction; but those people were far too
limited in their thinking to achieve a really explicit relationship to what is
going on today..." [Heidegger, Der Spiegel
Interview, 1976].

As if to illustrate the bankruptcy of the Post-Modern project, the American
philosopher Rorty has acknowledged that he is left with a simple, Nietzschean
"will to power" as the only source of energy for Post-Modern ideas. His own
theories have been backed into a corner, he acknowledges, that is
indistinguishable from what Heidegger "took to be the most degraded version of
the nihilism in which metaphysics culminates." [Rorty, Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, pp 116]. In short, Post-Modern philosophy is
left with nothing to say but that all values are relative, nothing can be
known, and communication is pointless. Nonetheless, these seem like
weighty and impressive conclusions because of the density and complexity of
post-modern prose and the movement’s historical pedigree. They are also a
perfect fit for the larger task of crafting a reactionary opposition to modern
Democratic Capitalism.

Epistemology: Another important development in recent Post-Modernism was
Paul Feyerabend's evolution from an important voice in the Philosophy of
Science to his publication of "Against Method" in which he developed the idea
of 'epistemological anarchism.' While not a Post-Modern per se,
Feyerabend gave voice to post-modern claims that science is simply a "white,
male" enterprise having no privileged status or claim to truth.

In the late 1950's, despite several twists and turns in his thinking in earlier
years, Feyerabend argued cogently "against positivism and in favor of a
scientific realist account of the relation between theory and experience,
largely on grounds familiar from Karl Popper's falsificationist views."
[Preston, John, "Paul Feyerabend", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/feyerabend/].
In addition, Feyerabend observed that science was often advanced through quite
mundane interactions with the real world such as chance discovery, the pursuit
of a personal intuition, or anger at being ridiculed by colleagues. That
is, pure theories like those found in the Philosophy of Science were not
sufficient to describe the rich operation of this very human enterprise.
In this, he was surely correct. However, in subsequent years, Feyerabend
abandoned essentially all analysis of scientific reason and promoted
the idea - to an adoring reception from the Post-Modern left - that all truth
was relative and we can know nothing, for sure, about the world. The
title of his book "Farewell to Reason," published in 1987, captures the spirit
of nearly all of Feyerabend's later thought.

The problem with Feyerabend's argumentation to the effect that there can be no
progress in science and no knowledge of the world - and thus that all
viewpoints are relative and equal - is that it simply flies in the face of our
experience. Feyerabend has been, for obvious reasons, unable to convince
the great mass of humanity that his theory is a more accurate guide to
their experience than the evidence of their own senses. Despite
his assertion that we cannot describe the real world accurately, we do it all
the time and with enough accuracy that bridges remain standing, new medicines
cure the sick, and new military weapons effectively destroy their
targets. Of course, Feyerabend has responses to these critiques but the
very nature and complexity of the responses places one in mind of the
absent-minded philosopher still babbling incoherently long after the party has
moved on to discuss other issues in other rooms.

At this point, the Post-Modernists are essentially the only people to continue
paying attention to Feyerabend. Given how easily his thought can be
molded into support for a power play against the established Democratic
Capitalist order by ethnic, gender and political groups, he remains an
important figure in establishing the philosophical credentials for these
groups.

Literary Criticism / Deconstructionism: An even more fashionable tool for
academic anti-modernism arose in the person of Jacques Derrida and the
theory/practice associated with him: Deconstructionism. Derrida
points out that the very foundation of rationalism is built on a metaphysical
commitment to a distinction between appearance and reality ('logocentrism' or,
sometimes, 'phallogocentrism'). The obsession with 'reality': a 'true
world' hidden from our eyes by the senses, by sin or by the structure of human
understanding causes the Western tradition to make "what deconstructionists
often call 'the traditional binary oppositions': true--false,
original--derivative, unified--diverse, objective--subjective, and so on. "
[Rorty, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism -- vol.8 From
Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
URL=http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/rorty.html]

This statement is somewhat uncontroversial but Derrida's conclusion astonishes
and horrifies:

"Derrida is trying for the position for which Heidegger had
implicitly nominated himself, that of the first post-metaphysical thinker, the
prophet of an age in which the reality--appearance distinction has entirely
lost its hegemony over our thought."

"he turned from Heidegger's sentimental question ... to the
quasi-political questions 'How can we subvert the intentions of texts which
invoke metaphysical oppositions? How can we expose them as metaphysical?' He
turned from Heidegger's preoccupation with the philosophical canon to the
development of a technique which could be applied to almost any text, past or
contemporary, literary, or philosophical. This was the technique which has come
to be called 'deconstruction.' "

"Derrida says of the logocentric philosophers...:
'[correspondence between word and reality] is the essence, or better, the telos
[objective or ends] of language. No philosophy has ever renounced this
Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is
philosophy.' (Margins, p. 247) To succeed in twisting free of the logocentric
tradition would be to write, and to read, in such a way as to
renounce this ideal. To destroy the tradition would be to
see all the texts of that tradition as self-delusive, because [it is] using
language to do what language cannot do. Language itself, so to speak, can be
relied upon to betray any attempt to transcend it (see Derrida, Writing, pp.
278-81). " [ibid]

In short - we cannot truly transcend language with language so we will
write nonsense to point out that language itself is nonsense - to "twist free"
of tradition. Why does Derrida wish to "twist free"? So he can prove
himself the "prophet of an age" in which the distinction between reality and
appearance is lost? One need only reflect on what has happened in past
times when such a distinction is lost or purposely obscured (see more below).
Invariably "truth" becomes a matter for political manipulation and
control. Of course, the Post-Modernists argue that this has already
happened and we all suffer under the oppression of the Democratic Capitalist
system. But this misses the point that the very act of Democratizing
the instruments of truth-telling by the classical liberal philosophers led to
an explosion of participation by the people in the creation of a world - the
present world - that is more to their comfort, longevity and health. In
other words, even if they are right in their attempt to make nonsense of
language (and the critiques of Derrida on this point have been blisteringly
effective) the Post-Modern Deconstructionists offer nothing to the great mass
of humanity except the prospect of kissing Derrida's feet as "the prophet" of a
new age. The nihilism and moral vacuity are manifest.

Economic Theory:
Finally, the Marxist wing was rejuvenated by and continues to derive energy
from Immanuel Wallerstein's epic The Modern World-System (Wallerstein,
1974). In this work, Wallerstein significantly extended Paul Baran's idea
that, while it is true that Capitalism eventually co-opted the workers within
Capitalist societies, it did so only by shifting immiseration to the third
world. That is, modern Capitalism succeeds only to the degree that it
sucks wealth out of third-world societies. This is often called the Baran-Wallerstein revision.
It lies at the heart of the "Neo-Marxist"
school, sometimes called simply "Radical Political Economy." As
with all of the lines of idealist thought descending from Rousseau, however,
this thesis is less a rational investigation of global economics and more an
attempt to preserve the ideological purity of Marxism. In this, the
Post-Modern Marxists have descended into mere anti-Capitalist propaganda whose
primary goal is to radicalize the young and the willing. The shame of
this is that there are important critiques to be made of modern supra-national
organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But, as long as the left affiliates with the Post-Moderns and their obviously
deceptive propaganda, any attempt that they mount to reform these organizations
is easily discredited.

Summary:I
have discussed Post-Modern political theory, epistemology, criticism and
economic theory in four distinct treatments. However, all of the thinkers
in these lines of inquiry share the common objective of undermining the
dominant Democratic Capitalist order. This objective binds the players
together in a web of both overlapping theory and political action. The
economic theorists provide energy and urgency to the philosophical attempt to
construct an alternative theory of political life. The epistemological
attack on rationality opens the door to the dismissal of defenses of the
Democratic tradition by conservative economists, literary critics, and
political philosophers. That is, if facts are presented to contradict the
Post-Modern effort, they are easily dismissed as a manifestation of the
"dominant, white, male patriarchy" and they are safely ignored in the attempt
to build a "feminist economics" (or epistemology, etc.). If a non-white
or female makes the observation, they have simply been "co-opted by the
dominant world model." On the other side, an attempt to dispute the
validity of "queer theory" or "ethnic studies" provides an inflammatory
rationale for shouting down the critic as an obvious participant in the
economic and philosophical oppression of third world peoples.

Thus, the Post-Modern project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a
philosophical cover for its errors that prevents anyone from undercutting the
outrage. Attempts to point out its philosophical shortcomings are nearly
useless because the expressions of this philosophy are maddeningly jargonesque
and impenetrable. In this, Post Modern Leftism is enormously attractive
to any party having a gripe against the modern world. Every failed state,
every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur,
and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern
variant of Rousseau's Hydra. Its energetic rise in modern Europe will
prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

Post-Modernism as Propaganda

Democratic Capitalism is unique in having both serious flaws and powerful
mechanisms for addressing these flaws and co-opting the legitimate grievances
of its critics. The very nature of its adaptability has made it
maddeningly difficult to undermine. In response, the Post-Modern efforts
have sharply increased the shrillness and urgency of their critique.
Indeed, the most recent "street" incarnation of Post-Modernism is simple katalepsis:
the irrational, inflammatory lie against the forces of Democratic
Capitalism. A hatred for the modern and the successful as well as a
sneering, derisive but ultimately impotent protest against the rise of the
commercial age marks the current public debate. In this, we note that some
things never change. Again, Rousseau:

"If the sciences really better'd manners, if they taught man
to spill his blood for his country, if they heighten'd his courage; the
inhabitants of China ought to be wise, free, and invincible. - But if they are
tainted with every vice, familiar with every crime; if neither the skill of
their magistrates, nor the pretended wisdom of their laws, nor the vast
multitude of people inhabiting that great extent of empire, could protect or
defend them from the yoke of an ignorant Barbarian Tartar, of what use was all
their art, all their skill, all their learning?" (from Discourse on Arts and
Sciences, 1749)

This is, quite simply, an obfuscation of the meanest order. Rousseau is
arguing that the sciences are of no functionalutility when
he must have recognized that this was untrue. Even as early as 1749, the
military prowess of technologically advancing states was manifest.
Fast-forward to the present and we have Noam Chomsky:

"In other words, Western civilization was basing its plans
on the assumption that they might lead to the death of several million innocent
civilians -- not Taliban, whatever one thinks of the legitimacy of slaughtering
Taliban recruits and supporters, but their victims." [Chomsky,
The War in Afghanistan, Excerpted from Lakdawala lecture,
New Delhi, December 2001]

Chomsky isn't wrong when he cites great suffering in Afghanistan and
gross errors in the implementation of the Afghani post-war assistance. He
is, rather, discredited by his attempt to radically inflate the projected
suffering and then blame Democratic Capitalism for Afghani suffering despite
the obvious legacy of Islamic Fascism (which, of course, he also blames on the
West). His attempt to seize the high ground by imputing evil motives to
democratic leaders, his willingness to create the compelling lie and the
one-sided story, and his pose as a detached academic, all reflect the nihilism
and rot at the core of Post-Modernism. Nevertheless, as a propagandist,
he is remarkably popular.

Chomsky, like nearly all of Rousseau's intellectual descendents and Rousseau
himself, is enamored of propaganda. Should their ideological assumptions
fail to rationally describe the real world it is easily enough dismissed as a
limitation of rationality itself (pace Feyerabend). A nihilistic focus on
the Will to Power - on power itself - marks all living descendents of
Rousseau's experiment even as some among them, like Rorty, struggle with the
legacy of violence found in their tradition. Among the initiated; the
assorted leftists, anarchists, "queer theorists" and feminists, the pressure
for ideological conformity is enormous. Indeed, the pressure to remain on
the "right side" of the anti-Capitalist debate is so strong that groups such as
"Queers for Palestine" openly support Islamic thugs under whose rule their own
members would surely be brutally harassed or even murdered.

There is little surprise here. In all previous incarnations of
anti-Capitalist power, ideological conformity was the centerpiece of political
control. In the former Soviet Union and its satellites, the crushing of
dissent was so total as to inspire Czeslaw Milosz to write:

"OFFICIALLY, contradictions do not exist in the minds of the
citizens in the people's democracies [the former Soviet empire]. Nobody
dares to reveal them publicly. And yet, the question of how to deal with
them is posed in real life. More than others, the members of the
intellectual elite are aware of this problem. They solve it by becoming actors.
...A constant and universal masquerade creates an aura that is hard to bear,
yet it grants the performers certain not inconsiderable satisfactions. To
say something is white when one thinks it is black, to smile inwardly when one
is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love...- these actions lead one
to prize one's own cunning above all else...Acting on a comparable scale has
not occurred often in the history of the human race." [Milosz, The Captive
Mind, pp 54-57].

The Modern and Post-Modern West Today

Clearly, Europe does not march in monolithic lockstep with the Post-Modernist
left. However, the sheer scope of the European protests, the
philosophical sentiments (crudely) presented by the protestors, organizers and
press, and the massive public support for Chirac’s anti-Americanism make it
clear that the Post-Modern Left exerts a very strong influence over European
thought. In America, while the Post-Modern Left has a sizable
presence among the American intelligentsia, the country as a whole is a
reasonably good, albeit evolved, example of Classical Liberalism. Given
these observations, it is clear that America's present conflict with Europe is
not simply a function of disagreement over military intervention: they reflect
fundamental differences in the dominant philosophical systems operating in each
domain. Furthermore, these two traditions - and thus America and Europe -
cannot be reconciled: their disagreements reach down to their very
foundations. This "Cold War" of ideologies provides the energy that will
continue to keep anti-Americanism bubbling in Europe for the foreseeable
future.

In this new Cold War, America should not expect a fair debate or honest,
balanced treatment in the European press or by "old Europe's" leaders and
opinion makers. As long as it walks the admittedly expansionistic path of
remaking the Islamic World, it will continue to face inflammatory criticism and
boiling resentment. As long as its economy outstrips those in Germany and
France, it will be seen as exploitative and predatory. The breadth of
"progressive" Rousseauean idealism in the European polity and a long history of
demonizing both Capitalism and Christianity make it "obvious" to many Europeans
that America is acting shamefully in its effort against Iraq. As the
World War II generation, with its memories of American sacrifice for Europe,
dies out, restraints upon this tendency to criticize America will continue to
fall away. By the same token, the shallowness of the hard left case and
the intimate commercial relations between America and Europe will work to
suppress the most virulent opposition to America. Nevertheless, it is
utterly predictable that the Iraqi war will inspire the hard left broadsheets
and opinion makers - in Europe and America - to willfully exaggerate the
suffering of Muslim civilians, to lie about death totals, and to print
spit-spewing rants about American genocide. It is simply the nature of
political discourse in the ongoing Cold War that this should be so.

The greater concern over the long term is the possibility of a return to
ideological extremism among European governments. It is chilling to hear
Chirac warn prospective members of the European Union that they had "missed an
opportunity to shut up" and even more disturbing to see the rise of an
unelected governing body on the European Continent. The small and large
manifestations of ideological elitism, when understood in the philosophical
context in which they are evolving, are disturbing portents for the future of
Europe.